Nursing School Bloopers

Nurses Humor

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Anyone have any funny nursing school stories from their past?

I had to change an IV bag and went in with my instructor to do so. My instructor always made me nervous but I was determined to remain confident and do the task....it wasnt difficult. She proceeded to ask me what was in the bag and I told her normal saline. She told me "ok, go ahead" and stood back to watch. I proceeded to pull out the line to put it into the new bag, but didn't take it off the IV pole before doing so. I received a saline bath with the remaining fluid that was in the bag. My instructor ran to get a towel and we cleaned up the wet floor. She then asked me to step outside the room. I thought I was going to hear it. What I heard was her laughing and telling me that I had to laugh sometimes and "everyohne has a saline bath once and then it never happens again." I still don't believe her but its funny looking back now.

Specializes in LTC.

I did one of my first suppositories to an elderly woman, my gloves were to big so I put in the suppository and had to pull my glove up to finish inserting it, before I could get my glove pulled up she coughed, the suppository shot out of her rectum like a small bullet,:chuckle it was so funny then she says honey is everything ok, what do you do with that I said yes and inserted another one while still laughing.:nurse:

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Specializes in Hospice, LTC.

I was having to insert a cath into the male mannequin. When I grabbed his member I started laughing and got really embarrased, but I wouldn't let go because you can't once you grab it. I ended up standing there holding it in my left hand and laughing with my head buried in my shoulder for what seemed like an eternity. I was gripping it so hard I actually pulled it off, so I held it in my hand, inserted, inflated the bulb, and then put it back on the mannequin. She passed me, but I never did live that one down.... That male mannequin got the best of me several times. Once I had to carry him from the lab into the class room, I dropped him and stooped down to pick him up, mind you he was naked. Every time I went to grab him, he slid back down. So I would stoop, come up a little, stoop, come up a little. My instructor came up from behind and saw me stooped over him bobbing up and down and asked me if I was having fun. I was mortified.:imbar

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Specializes in LTC.

thanks for the laugh I think we have all done silly things but thats what we remember and get to share with the new ones comming up

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I was taking this lady's temperature and was having trouble loading the probe protector.

I put it in the patient's mouth and accidently hit the button at the end and it shot the probe protector into her mouth.

She spit it back out and started laughing hysterically. I was laughing too and apologizing profusely.

Turned out she was a nurse and had done the exact same thing once to a patient...which is another reason she was laughing...she thought no one else would do something that dumb...well, she met her twin!!!

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Specializes in Medsurg.

I was a little naive in my first supervised clinical assessment with my professor. So i introduced myself to the patient and told the patient that i wanted to do head to toe assessment. The patient was like, "what is that?" so in an attempt to explain in simple terms what assessment means, i said, "can i check your body?", the patient up the bed and said , "Whattt?"

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Specializes in OB.

:chuckle I've actually done that before. I was getting my stitches removed by a med. student. I screamed right when he touched me with the scissors. soooo evil, hahaha

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So about a 2 weeks ago, I was on the medical floor which is on the 2nd floor. My instructor and 2 students were on the floor with me. I had to go down to the first floor for something. I got to the elevator which was right across from the nurses' station. I saw the lights flicker and didn't think anything of it. I got in the elevator and pressed "1" and the lights flickered again. I thought "Oh that can't be good." The elevator started going down and then stopped. I was still ok at this point. Then the doors opened and all I saw was metal. I was stuck between floors! SOOOOO, I was looking at all the buttons and couldn't for the life of me figure out which one to push to get help. I pulled out my cell phone and called a student that was just on the floor with me. NOTHING! I called the instructor. She answered and as soon as she did, I tried to stay calm and then I freaked out! Started crying like crazy and kept saying "it's stuck, It's stuck." I had no idea that she was on her way to the elevator to try to press the button and see if it would go back to the floor. Well a few seconds later (seemed like hours) the doors opened and I hung up on my instructor and ran out the elevator as fast as I could! I didn't even think to say anything to her because I couldn't. I just saw the doors open to the floor and ran. A lady that was trying to get in the elevator kept asking me if I was ok but I couldn't answer because I was crying so hard. I got to my instructor and she wanted to know why I didn't stay on the phone and why I hung up. She said she didn't know if the elevator had crashed to the bottom or not and didn't know what was going on because she couldn't understand me. I was having a panic attack. I couldn't talk, couldn't breathe, and had a very bad pain in my chest for about an hour. The 2 students that were with me were trying to calm me down. I had a bad day the rest of the day. Everything kept going wrong. I dropped things constantly all day and just couldn't get my head straight.

Normally, I don't freak out like that.

Well, I went to my instructor about an hour or 2 later and apologized for freaking out. She kinda fussed at me. She said it was fine but I need to learn to control myself because I can't freak out like that in front of patients. THERE WERE NO PATIENTS AROUND. Then by post conference, all of the students knew about what happened because she told them and to this day I still get picked on about it.

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Oh man, I think the funniest thing I ever saw was in a lab. We were having a simulation lab, with one of those "dummies" that does everything. There were about ten of us in the next room watching two students take care of the patient on the video screen. One of the tasks was to remove the foley (the pt is a male)...oh, and we were almost half way thru school by this time, so removing the foley was the easiest task of the scenario. The student, we'll call him Sam, walked up to the patient and told him he was going to take out his catheter. We're all looking at the screen wondering where his syringe is to deflate the bulb. He puts gloves on, and reaches for the tube and proceeds to start pulling on it without deflating the bulb. We all started yelling at the screen and having hysterics as the foley tube gets tighter and tighter and he pulls harder and harder...he finally realizes what he's doing and turned beet red!! Luckily, the instructor who was pretending to be the patient didn't notice the mistake. We were all crying from laughing so hard- thank God he did that on a dummy and not a real person!!! When they came back over to our room to talk about the scenario, we were all still rolling on the floor, and could barely tell the story to the instructor who missed it. I'm sure he'll never live it down!

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This is a story from NP school ~

I was doing clinical in an HIV clinic. My preceptor went to see another patient while I saw a stable patient. The patient, a delightful woman in her mid-thirties with a few kids, asked me about her most recent CD4 count. Excited to discuss it I pulled out her labs. The way it is reported, they give the percent and the absolute. Her absolute CD4 count was excellent, something like 400. This was 16% of her total lymphocytes. Glancing down quickly I mixed up the two values... and told her SHE HAD 16 T-CELLS.

Understandably, she just about lost it. Do I have AIDS? How did it decrease so much? Do I have to go to the hospital? Who will take care of my kids? The poor woman. I counseled her on the options, talked it through, held her hand while she cried in shock. This went on for about 10 minutes. Then, OMG. I went to report off to my preceptor and realized what I'd done. All that for nothing.

With a red face I went back to the patient and apologized profusely. She was relieved. I felt like writing "World's Biggest Dork" on my forehead.

You can bet I take my time now looking at that CBC :rolleyes:

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Specializes in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Medical.

We were on our community health nursing and our topic is about immunization so we went to every household and started the immunization. Normally, we are taught that before we inject, we must first disinfect the IM site. My classmate forgot to do this so our instructor reminded him of that procedure... but it seems like he did not understand our instructor and what he did was disinfect the needle instead of the IM site.

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Nothing like a pure salt bath once in a while!:jester:

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Speaking of those dummies... we have one that I will name "george". We were moving him from the hospital bed to a table so that one of the students could lay in one of the beds for a demonstration... well half way from moving him from the bed to the table his member fell off.

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